How to remove the first element of an array in Ruby

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to remove the first element of a given array in Ruby.

Consider, we have the following array:

prices = [10, 20, 30, 40]

Now, we want to remove the first element 10 from the above array.

Removing the first element

To remove the first element of an array, we can use the built-in shift method in Ruby

Here is an example, that removes the first element 10 from the following array.

prices = [10, 20, 30, 40]

prices.shift

puts prices

Output:

[20, 30, 40]

Note: The shift method modifies the original array.

If you don’t want to modify the original array, you can use the drop() method in Ruby.

prices = [10, 20, 30, 40]

adjusted_prices = prices.drop(1)

puts adjusted_prices

Output:

[20, 30, 40]

In the above example, we have passed 1 as an argument to the drop() method. so it creates a new array by removing the first element from the prices array.